The next morning Aiden woke up knowing something had shifted.
Not dramatically. Not in the way that things shifted in stories, with a sudden clarity or a moment of recognition that announced itself. Just: he was aware, in the specific way of someone whose mind began working before the rest of him was fully awake, that the baseline had moved.
He lay still for a moment in the narrow bed in the room that Site B had given him, which smelled like the rest of the building, flour and rust and the particular staleness of a space that had been repurposed from something else, and he looked at the ceiling and he thought about a hand open on a table.
He got up.
He went downstairs.
Kael was already there.
* * *
This was not unusual.
